Failure in Libya

There will be no Friday column, unfortunately: we had an auto accident a couple of days ago, and I’m picking up the pieces – literally. No one was hurt, thank the gods, but our car was totaled and since I don’t live in the Big City anymore, but, instead, way out in the woods, life is suddenly full of difficulties. Add to this being hit – from behind – by an uninsured driver, and …. Well, at any rate, you see my point: I’ll be back, never fear, on Monday.

Libya represents the failure
of the interventionist project envisioned by the Obama administration:
as rebel gangs run wild, attacking rival tribesmen – and “traitors,”
like their former commander-in-chief – the country threatens to become
what the more ambitious interventionists love best: a Failed State,
that is, a state that fails to maintain its monopoly on the use of force
in a given geographical area. For the War Party, every such failure is an opportunity to fill the power vacuum.

Faster than you can say “I
told you so,” we’ll have boots on the ground. No other course is
possible, given what is unfolding in Libya at the moment. The country
has no real government – a condition the Powers That Be cannot allow
any longer than a few weeks. It could be that the National Transitional
Council (NTC) will proclaim itself the “official” government, having
already achieved this recognition from the NATO powers and the UN. Yet
the reality on the ground is and will continue to be quite different.
As the smoke begins to clear, one thing is becoming apparent: foreign
troops will be patrolling the streets of Tripoli quite soon – and indeed
they are already there, albeit out of uniform.

As Libya comes more and more
to resemble Somalia writ large, the blowback coming our way from the
“responsibility to protect” doctrine will continue to waft over
Washington, and the capitals of Europe. The West cannot and will not
allow such disorder to exist in such close proximity to Europe: Somalia
borders the Indian Ocean, but Libya’s famous beaches line the Mediterranean.
Without a real government to deal with, the West will be forced to negotiate
with the many tribal entities and independent actors who are splintering
the former Libyan state into ever-smaller pieces. With the Western region
demanding more representation in the NTC, the Gadhafi loyalists still
on the loose, and thousands of weapons – some of them quite sophisticated – disappearing into the Libyan night, it’s quite a muddle – which
just about describes the state of our Middle East policy at this juncture.

Look at what this administration
has “accomplished” on the Libyan front: a three-way civil war, at
the very least, between various rebel factions and Gadhafi loyalists – and the prospect that heavy weapons, including from Gadhafi’s
arsenals, have fallen into the hands of the Libyan Islamic Fighting
Group (LIFG). The “former” leader of this terrorist outfit is the
new commander of the rebels’ armed forces. Once tagged as the Libyan
franchise of al-Qaeda, LIFG is supposed to have been disbanded,
but it has merely taken on a new name: the Libyan Army.

How did this happen?

Under the “liberal” Obama,
the US has launched a major effort to consolidate and extend its Middle
Eastern colonization program into fresh territory, pushing forward the
frontiers of empire both physically and ideologically – and this latter
aspect of the new aggressiveness is what I find interesting.

The “responsibility to protect”
doctrine, the banner unfolded as we went into the Libyan battle, represents
the complete descent of the ruling elites of the West into madness.
If insanity requires a certain unselfconsciousness, an inability as
well as an unwillingness to see one’s actions objectively, then surely
this describes the Western mindset as we hail Libya’s chaotic “liberation.”
To look at what is happening in that country and declare it a “success”
– or, indeed, anything other than a catastrophe – is clear evidence
of mental disability. The blinding madness of our ruling elites has
them lurching from one disaster to the next, and proclaiming it a great
success – without any awareness of how close the whole imperialist
project is to collapse.

As Afghan insurgents strike
at the very heart of the American occupation, Kabul, and Iraq comes
apart at the seams, ever-cheerful US officials tweet their imaginary
“victories.” The Taliban is in retreat, the Afghans are “stepping
up,” and the Iraqis, too – we’ve been subjected to this torrent
of lies for years, now, and I doubt anyone even listens anymore. It
is like that voice coming out of the ever-present telescreens in George
Orwell’s Nineteen Eighty-Four,
hailing “our glorious victory on the Malabar Front!”

This administration speaks
in a different voice than its predecessor, but it’s a change in tone
rather than content: the point is still to get us to sign on to the
combined world-saving project and war of revenge that commenced the
day after 9/11/01. But the tone has significantly altered: this is imperialism
of the “smart” variety,” one that seeks to sell the old imperialism as a form of militarized social work – a particularly useful fiction
as we begin to intervene more aggressively in Africa.

This talking point, mainly
aimed at an American audience, is complemented by our new counterinsurgency
doctrine, known as “COIN”[.pdf] : championed by CIA director and
former Middle East top commander Gen. David Petraeus, this doctrine
is an Americanized version of the old Maoist-Guevarist strategy which
likened revolutionaries to fish who must “swim among the people.”
By living with “the people,” and sharing their lot, the theory is
that US troops could themselves deploy the tactics of a classical insurgency,
in effect mimicking the enemy. Just as the Viet-Cong, or, say Hezbollah,
created a parallel government in the shadow of occupation, so Afghan
villagers would gratefully accept the “government in a box” US strategists
had designed for them. The Petraeus Doctrine, in short, amounts to a
policy of nation-building from the bottom up: “clear, hold, and build,”
as the COIN-dinista slogan puts it.

So much of this New Think consists
of slogans, instead of real arguments: a collection of talking points,
however, is not a real military strategy.

It all sounds hunky-dory: gain
the people’s confidence by successfully protecting them against the
Bad Guys, giving them “infrastructure,” and building institutions
that inspire confidence in the American presence. There’s just one
problem, however: the Afghans’ conception of just exactly who are
the Bad Guys is quite different from our own. The COIN-dinistas evade
the central problem of counterinsurgency theory: how to reverse the
natural hostility of a population to an army of occupation. This “live
with the people” strategy was tried by the British before and during
the American Revolution, in the course of which British soldiers, including
Hessians, were boarded in the homes of the rebels – and we all know
how that turned out.

There’s no escaping it: no
matter how you dress it up, whether in the clean white robes of “humanitarianism”
and the “responsibility to protect,” or the purple robes of “benevolent
global hegemony”: today we are King George III. Our far-flung
legions are fighting insurgencies throughout Central Asia and the Middle
East, from Afghanistan to Somalia and several points in between. Our
President is a veritable Emperor, in the foreign policy realm, with
the military at his beck and call. We maintain a commanding global presence
in the form of bases and military assets on and around every continent.
America is a world empire, one that has lost its republican veneer almost
entirely, and no counterinsurgency theory can change the context within
which US troops abroad operate.

The geniuses over
at the State Department elevated the demonstrably unsuccessful Petraeus
Doctrine to the level of policy, and applied it to Libya – with entirely
predictable results. But that’s the essence of madness, isn’t it:
repeating the same nonsensical behavior while expecting different results
each time.

NOTES IN THE MARGIN

Go here to read my most recent column for Chronicles magazine, in which I discuss the FBI’s interest in Antiwar.com.

Author: Justin Raimondo

Justin Raimondo is editor-at-large at Antiwar.com, and a senior fellow at the Randolph Bourne Institute. He is a contributing editor at The American Conservative, and writes a monthly column for Chronicles. He is the author of Reclaiming the American Right: The Lost Legacy of the Conservative Movement [Center for Libertarian Studies, 1993; Intercollegiate Studies Institute, 2000], and An Enemy of the State: The Life of Murray N. Rothbard [Prometheus Books, 2000].
View all posts by Justin Raimondo